Beaten But Not Defeated

  First published by Chronos Books, 2014

  Chronos Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station Approach, Alresford, Hants, SO24 9JH, UK

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  Text copyright: Merilyn Moos 2013

  ISBN: 978 1 78279 677 0

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  The rights of Merilyn Moos as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Part 1: An anti-Nazi in Germany

  Chapter 1: Introduction

  Chapter 2: 1904 - 1928 Early life. The makings of a revolutionary

  Chapter 3: Bavaria: the early stamping ground of the Nazis; KPD resistance

  Chapter 4: 1928 - 1933 Political Background to the KPD

  1918-1928

  1928-1933

  Deadly mis-estimation of NSDAP

  Chapter 5: 1928 - 1933 Resistance

  May 1 1929

  Rotfrontkämpferbund (RFB)

  Cross-membership

  Berlin Proletarische Freidenker (BPF)

  The importance of left sporting organisations

  Agit-prop

  Alles an der Roten Start

  The India connection

  Going underground in Berlin

  Escape from Germany

  Stay in Paris

  PART 2: In exile in Britain

  Chapter 6: 1934 - 1938 The first years of exile

  Introduction

  Background

  1934-1937 Siegi’s political life: the KPD group in exile

  1934-1938 Siegi’s status as a refugee

  Lotte, Brian, the USSR and Siegi

  Chapter 7: 1938 - 1947 Life at Oxford: ‘A whole world separates me from the line’.

  Siegi at the Institute of Statistics

  Lotte and the USA

  The risk and reality of internment, 1940

  Die Zeitung

  Siegi’s writings 1938-1947

  The Holocaust and its shadow

  Chapter 8: 1947 - 1966 The Durham years. Drowning ghosts

  Chapter 9 1966 - 1988 London. Beaten but not defeated

  The Board of Trade and Harold Wilson

  The betrayal of the 1919 German Revolution

  The last years

  Epilogue

  Appendices

  1. 5 articles by Siegi Moos, on the role of revolutionary theatre, first published in 1930/31, in Arbeiterbühne und Film, translated by Ian Birchall

  2. Researching the KPD 1929-37. Conversations with three members of the KPD in the 1930s

  3. Hermann Binnswanger

  4. Members of Proletarian FreeThinkers

  5. Divisions amongst revolutionary left, 1929

  6. Weber/LaPorte debate about Stalinisation of KPD

  7. The Russian Oil Products (ROP)

  8. The Workers’ Olympics.

  9. Lotte Moos

  Bibliography

  Berlin 1933

  Oxford

  Durham, late 1950s

  To my parents, Siegi and Lotte Moos, who gave me life.

  Acknowledgements

  This is a book which would never have been written, never mind finished, if it had not been for the help of a large number of people. I want to thank in particular Irene Fick for her commitment and good nature in translating so many documents from German to English and English to German without which this book would have been impossible; Richard Kirkwood for his detailed knowledge and analysis of the revolutionary left in Germany during the Weimar Republic, and for the moments of inspiration in his exploration of my father’s role in Germany and then in Britain, and Ian Birchall for his generosity in translating my father’s articles and for his astute comments on the text. My thanks also to Nick Jacobs for his translation of the biographies in Hermann Weber’s: Deutsche Kommunisten Biographisches handbuch 1918 bis 1945, of the men and women who pass through Siegi’s biography. I also want to thank the following for their interest and encouragement: Charmian Brinson, Hugh Brody, Pete Cannell, Annie Duarte-Potter, and Sue Vice. Many other people provided me with useful material and ideas, either in document form or in discussion, all of whom I acknowledge in the endnotes.

  My particular thanks to Elfrieda Bruning, Hans Kohoutek and Rudi Schiffman, who has sadly died since I interviewed him. They all agreed to be interviewed aged 100 or over and gave me an invaluable insight into what it was like to be a Communist in the early 1930s in Germany. My thanks also to Dr Hans Coppi of the VVN-BdA (Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregines - Bund der Antifaschistinnen und Antifaschisten (VVN-BdA e.V., Association of Victims of the Nazi-Regime) for arranging the interviews for me.

  Although Chronos bore the greater part of the expense of publishing this book, it would not have been published if it were not for the generous financial support of Rudolph Moos, from the US, and Mairead Breslin Kelly, from Ireland. I suspect my father would have appreciated the historical irony that Rudolph’s gift was in part a consequence of his finally reacquiring and selling land that the Nazis had ‘taken over’ from Rudolph’s family over seventy years ago. Mairead’s heart-felt gift was also a product of a shared heritage - her father and my mother’s good friend had both been murdered in the USSR under Stalin. I am deeply grateful to Rudolph and Mairead for making the publication of this biography possible. Their gifts also highlight that neither Nazism nor Stalinism, both systems which blighted my parents’ lives, ultimately succeeded in their goals. We live to fight another day.

  Finally, this book would never have been written if it had not been for my parents. My father may not always have been the easiest of dads, but I did not doubt his love for me. He encouraged in me a sense of my own uniqueness and potential, which has made writing his biography possible.

  The world is a dangerous place to live in, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it. Einstein, letter to Max Born, 1937/38

  Prologue

  How do I present my father? How indeed do I present myself, his daughter, in this biography?

  I started to write this biography a long time after my father was dead (not uncommon, I suspect). This had the great advantage that I was not constrained by what would almost certainly have been his refusal to cooperate. My father was a complicated man with a personal and political history he preferred to keep private.

  How to find out about a man who had taken his many secrets to the grave? Researching any exile, uprooted from their country of birth, is complicated. What made this even more problematic was obtaining records about my father. A combination of the allied bombing of Germany, which obliterated many records, Nazi destruction, the dispatch of KPD papers into the locked archives of the USSR and my father’s fore-sighted tendency to have hidden away – under trees and floorboards - his own papers left me thin on primary material. Happily, there turned out to be useful (!) SS and Gestapo papers about Siegi’s time in Germany and two volumes of MI5 documents resulting from their close surveillance of my parents. And in the pro
cess of putting all this together, stories told me on those rare occasions by my father and mother came floating back into my memory.

  I had left it too late to interview anybody who knew Siegi in Germany. But then who would I have interviewed anyway? As far as I could gather, my father’s comrades had mostly been murdered. The one person, who, from the letters in my father’s archives, appeared to have survived - after nine concentration camps - I failed to trace before his death, hard though I tried.

  Moreover, almost everybody from my father’s immediate family had perished and the mother and daughter who did survive the camps were dead before I started this biography (one from old age, the daughter I suspect from suicide). Siegi’s parents had both died very young. His brother, Adolpho, had committed suicide in his early 20s. Hermann who unofficially adopted Siegi had no children of his own and ‘died’ in Theriesenstadt. There is a dispersed extended family as is the way with those fleeing Nazism: Brazil, Italy, Switzerland and the US, with whom generally I have had little contact; indeed my father had not been one to keep close ties with distant relatives. Even had I started far sooner, gaining information about my father from his German days would have proved difficult. Such complexities are one reason, I suggest, why writing the stories about anti-Nazi refugees is so rare.

  I was fortunate that some of my father’s articles about agit-prop had been preserved by Weber: and I thank him for allowing me to reproduce them. Siegi’s lyrics to accompany Wolpe’s music from the early 1930s also miraculously surfaced during my research. So between one form of record and another, I built up a picture. I was helped in understanding the texture of the early 1930s by interviewing three centenarians who had been in the KPD at the same time as my father, even though they did not (sadly) know him.

  Gathering information on my father’s time once he arrived in the UK was helped along by MI5 records. They seem to have opened all my parents’ mail until sometime in the 1940s (opening mail being their chief means of keeping tabs on German Communist refugees) so I have a fairly full - though partial – picture of Siegi and Lotte’s time in the 1930s.

  My personal knowledge of Siegi, except as a dad, was limited. While I knew my parents came from Germany and were anti-Nazis, very little else was allowed to penetrate our home. My parents wished to keep me protected. Another way of putting that is that they kept me in a cage. So my own knowledge of my father as a public figure is exceedingly limited.

  I look back now on both my parents with sadness. They had been too damaged to be able to provide much of the gentle skill of parenting. My father, less paranoid than my mother but far sterner, had dedicated himself - with extraordinary success - to the creation of a new world for himself of books, lecturing and writing in which a daughter did not have a part. He had lost so much, not just his family, his comrades and his ‘country’ but also of himself, that accessing his past was impossible for him. I was brought up ironically without a history and to feel the world was a threatening and insecure place. But with that came a sense of uniqueness. The little my father told me, for example, the story of his escape from Germany, defined me and gave me life-long courage.

  But I am left with how far to put myself into the biography. My relationship with him was far from easy. His past gave him strength but also sapped him. He was a tender man who was regularly consumed by rage. He expected respect and never to be contradicted. He could not bear closeness, physical or emotional. I both loved and feared him. I avoided his company. It is in these pages, that I have tried to find my father. But I have chosen to leave on one side his and my relationship, though it inevitably pushes its way into the narrative. It is his remarkable political life which should be better known.

  My father died when his grandson, Josh, of whom he delighted, was only one and Josh does not remember him. But I have written this biography in my father’s memory and I am proud of him.

  P.S. There is an issue about the use of the word ‘murdered’ in this biography. As is the norm here, I have used it to apply to both people who were gassed, shot or otherwise deliberately killed and those who died as a result of gruelling work, a starvation diet and grotesquely unhealthy living conditions. Germans use the word ‘unkommen’ to refer to the second group who died as a result of gross mistreatment but were not directly killed. Though I was tempted to make use of this distinction in this study, I decided ‘unkommen’ was too unfamiliar a word to use in an English-language context. So I use ‘murdered’ throughout to refer to both groups of Nazism’s victims.

  PART 1

  An anti-Nazi in Germany

  Chapter 1

  Introduction

  It took me a long time to come to terms with how little I knew about my father. As a child, I knew his date of birth, but where he was born and to whom were not matters that were talked about. Indeed, my timid questions about his parents or siblings elicited a sharp response. ‘It’s bourgeois to be concerned about matters of family,’ though when I was little, he said something more like: ‘Families don’t matter. You do understand that.’ I learnt when little not to try to open up the door to my father’s past and to horrors I only sensed.

  When young, I was told little stories to furnish me with some explanation of how I came to be born in Oxford. My father had had to flee the Gestapo in 1933 because he had been active in left wing theatre. This, I understood, was something to be proud of. He had walked out of Germany and had fled to the UK. It had taken him a long time and it was luck he survived. His life had been saved by a rural cobbler who had asked no questions and not given him away, when my father had appeared in his shop, the soles of his shoes worn right through. Much later on, my father had also told me that he was the secretary of the Freethinkers (but left me believing this was simply a Humanist organisation).

  It never struck me to unearth the stories that lay beneath my father’s tales. I learnt early to understand my parents’ unspoken wishes. I became terrified of asking questions and even more, of receiving answers.

  Later in my life, I began to develop a curiosity about both my parents’ pasts. My father died twenty years before my mother, and it was only in her declining years, that I got my hands on their archives. Well versed in paranoia, I knew to unravel every blanket for what might lie hidden in its folds, go through the pockets of every suitcase, look deep into the heaped carrier bags, and check all files for the papers which mattered. There slowly opened up a hidden history.

  There had been a few earlier intimations. A couple of years earlier, a friend had turned up a reference in the India files to my father acting on behalf of the Russian party. Rot, I had declared. My father had always denounced Stalin. One of my first memories was my abstemious parents opening a bottle of wine when they heard of Stalin’s death. My father had worn a red tie as the three of us had sat and toasted Stalin’s demise.

  The other clue had come via a researcher into my mother’s past. His news was unwelcome - and again, clearly untrue. My mother, he had informed me via an initial letter, had had an affair with a Communist spy. But she was already married; I remember protesting to him, after checking the date. I should have been more suspicious. I had been the spectator, as a young woman, to my mother’s many arguments with Richard Kirkwood as to why the USSR had got it wrong, crucially over collectivisation, although I had been puzzled at the detail of her knowledge. She opposed Stalinism if anything more than my father, I told the researcher. He had given me that researcher’s glance. ‘Well. I didn’t expect you to take it well.’

  I had already contacted Kew about my parents’ files and they had fobbed me off. I had been met with surprising resistance, which I failed to understand. Now I again approached them, indeed started to badger them to release both my parents’ MI5 files. When I was finally informed they would be released, I had expected to find a thick file on my left-wing activist father, and nothing much on my mother.

  But the reverse was the case. To my astonishment, my housewife boring mother had two thick files, my father nothing. This co
ntinues to intrigue me. My guess is that in the trawl in the 1960’s, my father’s files, along with thousands of others, were discarded. But it is still possible that they are still ‘under wraps’ because of his association with either the Free French or Harold Wilson (he was one of the - then unusual - special advisers in the Wilson government of 1966-1970). Fortunately, it has been possible to glean some information on Siegi from Lotte’s copious files.

  Siegi had left behind little to help with the reconstruction of his history. He had failed to talk systematically about his past, as far as I know, to anybody at all. His writing was of a theoretical not personal nature. Even the poetry he wrote in old age has a wonderfully polemical character; it says a lot about his politics but little about the man.

  Sadly my father’s consideration of writing his own autobiography, which is referred to in a letter (26.6.66, in personal possession) to him from Philip Andrews (Nuffield College), never came to fruition. We have Andrew’s responses to the points that Siegi must have made for not writing an autobiography. It is the same reply he gave me when I asked him, when he was already quite old, why he did not write an autobiography. There were no such things as facts in a history such as his, he told me. This is more understandable to me now then it was at the time. The older Siegi did not completely identify with his younger self. His other reason, I suspect, was that he did not see himself as more worthy of attention than his many comrades, too many of whom did not live to tell such tales. Now I know rather more as to why he could not write that autobiography. But it can only be regretted that Siegi could not have ‘owned up’ to his past. As I have only recently discovered, his life was far fuller than I had realised.

  I had always been told by both my father, and, after his death, my mother that Siegi had not belonged to the Communist Party. Very late in Lotte’s life, she told me, her lip curling with disdain that, yes, Siegi had belonged to the German Communist Party. In the months before Lotte’s death, she also told me that Siegi had belonged to the Rote Frontkämpferbund (the offensive/defensive anti-Nazi group, loosely affiliated to the KPD, discussed later) ‘But they never fired a shot at the Nazis’, she told me, adding something like: ‘What an idiot’. It came as a great - and not welcome - surprise, therefore, to discover that Siegi was not just an active member of the KPD in the early 1930’s, but probably one of their leading cadres in Berlin.